


A Dark and Silent Overture

by eyra



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Academia, Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Angst with a Happy Ending, Boarding School, Classics, Drug Use, Eating Disorders, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Mental Health Issues, Modern Era, Panic Attacks, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:54:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29112636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyra/pseuds/eyra
Summary: He was smiling to himself, eyes still closed, and Sirius hadn't known at the time - but by Fifth Year would realise well enough - where this Remus had come from. He was always a little wild, somehow both impossibly distant and blindingly, achingly present, all at once, and in the beginning Sirius had ascribed it entirely to Remus's own innate nature or some sort of slight chemical neurodivergence that made him just a little bit more than the rest of them; a little bit magic, a little bit mad. Freer than the others. A tempest in an otherwise still ocean.The boys at boarding school, told in libraries and cloisters and too much alcohol and the way Remus thinks none of it matters, anyway.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 40
Kudos: 134





	A Dark and Silent Overture

**Author's Note:**

> Went full melodrama with this one chaps. I was writing a lovely happy thing that I wanted to post a couple of weeks ago, but honestly I'm feeling crap and didn't have the energy to finish it. The lockdown in my country right now is hard and I'm utterly miserable with it. So instead of totally going off the rails, I wrote this as some sort of coping mechanism - it's not really an upper, but it kind of helped. I love these boys.
> 
> Please take note of the tags.

Sirius watches Remus across the table. His freckles - the ones across the bridge of his nose - are faded and sparse, the colour of biscuits. He always gets like that in the winter. In the summer, when they used to spend long afternoons and breaks between lessons sprawled out on the green between school and the cathedral, Remus's freckles would darken and multiply and bloom in the most wonderful places. The delicate triangle just below his eyes. The tops of his ears, peeking out from his unruly curls. There was usually one on the right-hand side of his mouth, spanning the boundary between the plush pinkness of his upper lip and his milk-white skin, cinched in by twin dimples in either cheek that pinched upwards when Remus would grin at a dirty joke from James or the way the sun felt on his face when he laid back with his eyes closed and his head resting in Sirius's lap.

The green between the school house and the Minster had been their sanctuary for those four years; their centre of gravity, their homestead to return to every September and long for through every break and every flat, colourless holiday that kept Sirius and James down at the Potters' in London and Peter up in the Lakes and Remus wherever Remus was at the end of term. Sometimes it was with his parents, who seemed to flit between the Midlands and the coast with no discernible pattern or reason. Sirius thinks there was an aunt, or a cousin perhaps out near Hull, and whichever relative the Lupins were staying with over any given holiday never seemed to quite have the room to accommodate Remus too and he'd come back to school with vague references to staying in a caravan on an uncle's driveway, or a sofa in a loft of a friend's house. Sirius tended not to ask about those friends. Sometimes, Sirius knows, Remus simply stayed in York - if it was just a Bank Holiday weekend and the rest of them had been summoned home for a night or two - and he'd say he'd been revising, or cleaning the room that he and Sirius shared overlooking the quad at the centre of the old school building. Sirius tended not to ask about that either, or the way that Remus seemed to always need a whole day following those weekends to sleep and languish in bed until the dazed look in his eyes faded and he started eating again.

There was the summer after Fifth Year when the eating thing became a problem, and someone in the faculty spoke to someone in Remus's family and it was decided - by whom, Sirius never knew - that Remus ought to go somewhere else for the holiday, and it wasn't until the August that the rest of them found out that he'd been sent off to a place with white walls and doors that didn't lock and bathrooms that didn't even have doors, and Remus laughed down the phone when he told James that they were weighing him every morning and making him eat jacket potatoes with butter and Sirius had laughed too, when James had told him, because it was so far off the mark of who Remus was. He didn't not eat because he was afraid to, or because of the numbers on the scales; he just forgot, or couldn't be bothered, or would rather save the room for a half bottle of vodka and a few of those pills he got from the guy in Year Eleven whenever he was bored or restless or the end of term was nearing and he needed one last high. He'd put on the weight easily in a few short weeks, and come back to school in the autumn filled out but otherwise largely unchanged, and still wonderfully mad in that singular way of his.

They were all in their Fourth Year of secondary when James and Sirius arrived at the Chorister's School, with its smoke-browned stone arches and its cobbled quad and a great hall barely half the size of the one at Eton. Sirius had never bothered to look it up, but assumes that it was named as such for some old, forgotten connection to the cathedral; certainly no one in their year could hold a tune, and not one among them went to church even when the bells woke them early on Sundays and they could hear the deep, groaning pipes of the organ from across the green. It wasn't the most prestigious school in the country. It wasn't even the best in the county, and Sirius had always delighted in how disappointed he knew his parents were that it was one of the only places of any regard that would take him and James after what they'd done at Eton. He can still remember standing outside his father's study that summer, listening to an enraged Orion on the phone to the heads of what must've been every private boarding school in the south, demanding that they take him and never mind about the governor's stolen Jaguar that the police had dredged up from the bottom of the Thames just outside Windsor. They'd merely been protesting the positively puritanical stance the board of governors had taken during his and James's most recent suspension, which had been blown entirely out of proportion because they'd only meant to rearrange a few stacks in the library and hadn't meant at all to burn down half the old kitchens at the back of the school. One big misunderstanding, Sirius had said around a barely concealed laugh, and Orion had hit him so hard it shattered his cheekbone in three places, and Fleamont and Effie had sighed and shaken their heads and sent them both away to the north for lack of any other option.

Peter, who James had met on the first day of term that year and immediately fallen in love with, had been a short, ruddy sort of fellow, all bluster and swear words and a suit and tie that he wore even at weekends because he'd read The Wolf of Wall Street over the summer and decided that he was going to become Cumbria's answer to Jordan Belfort. He even had a briefcase, which Sirius had teased him mercilessly for, and a laptop that cost far more than any fourteen-year-old's laptop had any business costing, and he would affect a delightfully fraught air about himself with no real pattern, muttering away and tapping frantically on his iPhone whilst the others lounged on the dew-damp grass in the shadow of the Minster. 

And then there was Remus. Remus, to begin with, was both more and less than Peter; quiet and withdrawn for the first few weeks of term, the only other new boy besides Sirius and James, until Bonfire Night when Sirius had found him stretched out under a tree in the little copse just down the cobbles from the school house. It was dark, and great green and white and electric blue fireworks were bursting overhead and dancing in Remus's blown-out pupils when Sirius leaned over him to ask him if he was alright, and Remus had laughed at him and offered him a swig from a bottle of something clear and strong, and that had been enough, really. Enough for the four of them to band together at the start of Epiphany term and demand one of the bigger rooms at the top of the school house so that they might all share, and James might continue to marvel at Peter's modest accumulations from his early forays into web forums about the stock market and Sirius might continue to sink deeper into the dark, unfathomable wonder of Remus.

He still remembers finding him, one night in the spring, alone in an empty hall somewhere at the back of the old rectory that the school had started renovating the previous winter to become a new cafeteria, or a second music room, or something. The builders had left for the night, tools and ladders and buckets scabbed over with dried gypsum scattered around the dusty parquet floor, abandoned and untidy, and Remus, in the middle of it all, with his arms outstretched and his school shirt hanging open at the neck as he closed his eyes and spun in a slow, sleepy circle.

"What are you doing in here?" Sirius had said, closing the heavy oak door behind him and blinking across at Remus in the moonlight.

"I'm at a party," Remus replied, still spinning on the spot, and Sirius had smiled despite the oddness of it all and perched himself on the middle step of a paint-splattered ladder next to a wall of bare plaster, pink and damp, the air in the room sharp and mineral.

"It's a very quiet party," said Sirius, still smiling, whispering for the late hour even though they were alone all the way over at this side of the school grounds.

"The best kind of party," Remus sighed. He was grinning to himself, eyes still closed, and Sirius hadn't known at the time - but by Fifth Year would realise well enough - where this Remus had come from. He was always a little wild, somehow both impossibly distant and blindingly, achingly present, all at once, and in the beginning Sirius had ascribed it entirely to Remus's own innate nature or some sort of slight chemical neurodivergence that made him just a little bit more than the rest of them; a little bit magic, a little bit mad. A tempest in an otherwise still ocean. Freer than the others. They all drank, even back then, and Remus always drank the most, but Sirius wouldn't find out about the pills and the white powders until at least a year later, and he would never be sure when all that had started anyway, so he remembers that at the time - in that newly-plastered rectory in the moonlight - he thought Remus was simply transcendent, and he absolutely loved him for it.

The rest of Fourth Year passed them all by in a squall of exams and assemblies and limitless, wonderful nights where the four of them would lounge around the library working on this essay or that, heads crowded together around reference books and dictionaries, arguing over Greek cases and French tenses and the way Peter drove them all insane with his tap-tap-tapping on his laptop. _"You're ruining the ambience entirely,"_ Sirius would snap, and Remus would throw his head back laughing. It was why Sirius said and did most things, in those days; to see Remus's reaction, and have Remus's attention on him and him alone for however long Remus deigned to reward him before he slipped away back into that half-state of his, eyes glazing over despite the smile still ghosting over his lips. Sirius would nudge him with his foot under the table, and Remus would grin at him, and they'd go back to their work and think they were much older and much more important than they actually were, in that library full of clever texts and candlelight. 

James was always the cleverest among them. It all came so naturally to him; the lessons, the tests, and he was so magnanimous and gracious about the whole thing that the other three adored him for his cleverness and never minded one bit when they worked harder and longer than he did and still fell far short of James's near-perfect marks. Peter was the only one who couldn't always hide his frustrations at himself, when he made a schoolboy error in an essay or didn't quite make a pass on an exam, and James would take him away to a quiet corner of the library and work on the texts with him - over and over and over again, sometimes - until Peter was caught up and back to his usual blustering self, typing furiously away on his laptop. Sirius did alright in lessons; better than Peter, not as well as James. He didn't mind too much, since any missed deadline or wrongly answered question always made him smile to himself at the thought of Orion hating him for it and the knowledge that Fleamont wouldn't care one bit, so long as he was trying. Which he was, usually.

Remus was both the worst and the best of them, save for James. He had months where he would breeze through lessons, barely needing to even look at the texts, it seemed, before being able to give perfect word-for-word recitals, nailing point after point on whatever subject he was being tested on that day. Sometimes Sirius thought, in those months, that maybe Remus _was_ cleverer than James; there were times when every confident, assured answer James gave would have a matching but somehow elevated one from Remus - a point taken a step further, or a history rolled back another half-century to better explain the narrative. And all delivered in that sort of careless, roving way of his, as if he were happy enough to take part but believed that none of it actually mattered, and found the whole thing faintly amusing.

But then there were other months - and it never had any pattern or rhythm to it - when Remus would crash, and miss lessons, and write essays so protracted and simplistic that Sirius thought he must be purposefully looking for a scolding from a professor or a review of his scholarship. That was something that had only come to light at the start of Fifth Year; that Remus had, as well he might, impressed the admissions tutors so much that he'd been awarded a full scholarship right up until the end of Sixth Form, providing he kept his marks up and didn't cause trouble. And the trouble, Sirius found out that same year, was a reference to a report of _"consistent and unbecoming poor behaviour"_ that Remus had received at his old school in Birmingham - some local comprehensive that Sirius hadn't heard of and that Remus never spoke about. He would wonder, as the years went on, whether the switch from a state day school to a private boarding school some hundred-odd miles away wasn't less about Remus's future academic opportunity and more about his parents wishing to sequester their son away somewhere where he wouldn't trouble them during term time. He never asked Remus about that, of course, and the way Remus always seemed to come back to himself on the precise essay or exam needed to maintain his scholarship position told Sirius that Remus was just as happy to be away from home as his parents - in Sirius's mind, at least - were happy for him to be gone.

The Michaelmas term of Lower Sixth had been one of those dark, horrid periods where Remus would slip away and become someone else. The two of them were sharing a room by that point - James and Peter taking up a twin room facing theirs at the other side of the quad - and Sirius had come back in the September to find Remus already there, unpacked and lounging on Sirius's bed with his bottom against the wall and his legs reaching up vertically towards the ceiling, shoes scuffing marks along the paint.

"What on earth are you doing?" Sirius had asked mildly, dumping his cases by the door and wandering over to sit next to Remus on the mattress.

"Can't feel my feet," Remus said flatly, and Sirius had shucked his coat off and shuffled down the bed to lay next to Remus, stretching his own legs up the wall to match him.

"Huh," Sirius murmured after a moment, as he felt the blood rush from his toes right down to the top of his head, making him dizzy and cold. "I see what you mean."

That was the first summer that Remus had been in the hospital, with the morning weigh-ins and the baked potatoes and the bathrooms without doors, and he'd been normal enough for the first few days of term and Sirius had delighted in the weight he'd put on and the way his cheeks had a faint flush to them where previously they'd been chalk-white. But then some dark sky had rolled in, and Remus had stopped eating again, and he spent most of that autumn hanging back when the others went off to the library and then turning up, minutes or hours later, with blown-out pupils and a manic energy that was equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking to Sirius. He'd crash into the room with no notes or book bag, and wander distractedly over to their table in the hollow of the turret on the first gallery, and the others would carry on working whilst Remus lounged in an armchair by the window or slumped over the desk next to Sirius, cheek pressed against the old graffiti etched into the mahogany and Sirius would carry on writing with his right hand whilst his left found Remus's curls and traced slow, comforting patterns with his fingertips.

"Come on, darling," Sirius remembers James saying one night, probably around that Christmas, as he sank into the chair beside Remus and put a warm hand on the patch of cool skin between Remus's shirt collar and his curls where Sirius's own hand rested, as ever. "Let's get this essay written."

They'd stayed up until the verger had begun lighting the morning candles in the windows of the cathedral across the green from them, and Remus had slowly written out paragraph after paragraph with an unsteady pen under James's quiet instruction, Sirius rifling through books and journals to find chapters for Remus and James to reference whilst Peter made them all mugs of coffee using a kettle he'd taken from behind the empty librarian's desk. James went with Remus to hand the essay in at the history department before bringing him back to the school house, where Sirius had fired up the heating in their room and set a pint glass of water on Remus's bedside table. Sirius had stayed with him that day, James and Peter tiredly traipsing off to lessons and making excuses for the other two, and when Sirius woke up on his own bed sometime in the afternoon, disorientated and groggy, it was to find Remus watching him from his pillow, and Sirius can still remember how sad he looked in that moment.

"I need to start trying again, don't I?" Remus had whispered, and Sirius had stayed on his own bed and wondered how it could be possible to physically ache on account of someone else's melancholy.

"I think so," Sirius whispered back, and when Remus fell back to sleep that evening Sirius had stolen away and conspired with James in hushed voices over dinner in the great hall, and all four of them had ended up staying in York that Christmas.

It had been a turning point, of sorts, though Sirius had struggled to figure out which direction precisely they were all turning in. Remus did try harder, from that January, and was soon back to matching James in Maths and Biology, and actually surpassing him in Religion and Greek, and Sirius beamed at him across the classroom when their Classics professor read out the closing paragraph from Remus's latest essay, so impressed were the department faculty by his arguments, their professor said. They also, concurrently, noticed themselves growing a little wilder, whether due to hormones or their embracing of the new freedoms offered to them by virtue of being in the Sixth Form. Free periods were more common, weekends were longer, and afternoons sprawled out on the green turned into evenings charming bouncers and doormen of second-rate bars down by the river. James, at least, looked older than his seventeen years, and could usually get served without arousing any suspicions. Peter's portfolio had, by then - and to Sirius's utter disbelief - actually grown into something bordering on impressive and by the spring it wasn't uncommon for them to spend entire nights slumped round tables of empty shot glasses and bottles of Grey Goose, and Sirius regularly thanked his stars that he'd ended up in York and not in London and could therefore get away with this sort of thing whilst barely needing to even use the fake driving license he'd bought last summer for this very purpose. If they ever did get questioned - which wasn't often - James would simply draw himself up to his full, impressive height, and charm whichever proprietor or bartender was asking, and Sirius absolutely loved watching that. Sometimes Peter would pull a fifty out of his wallet and slide that across the table to sweeten them further, and Sirius thought that was pretty wonderful, too. On occasion, and usually when they were at one of the darker, more exciting places on the far side of the city, Remus would lean in to mutter something in a doorman's ear, and the doorman would smile and look Remus up and down and let them all in, and Sirius hated that.

And then came a night in June that would burn itself into Sirius's memory like a firebrand. It was a Friday, and they'd been at one of those horrible places on the other side of the river, and Remus had disappeared off to the bathroom and the others hadn't been able to find him for hours. The bathrooms were full but Remus wasn't there, and he wasn't at the bar, and he wasn't in the outside smoking area which is where Sirius usually found him when he wandered off late into the night. In the end they'd left and traced their usual route back through the city to the school house, hoping to find Remus wandering home himself or - if it came to it - slumped on a bench somewhere in the centre of town with a bag of chips and a dead phone battery. But he wasn't, and when they stole back into their school house and appeased the night porter with the usual packet of cigarettes and handful of notes from Peter's wallet, they found Remus wasn't there either. Not in his own bed, or Sirius's bed, or sprawled out on the cobbles of the quad under the stars. Peter had headed back out then, to walk the green outside the cathedral and see if Remus hadn't taken himself off there, and James and Sirius had stood in a patch of moonlight at the end of Remus's bed and fretted terribly about what to do.

"This isn't like him," Sirius had said worriedly, checking his phone for the hundredth time.

"This is entirely like him," James had reasoned in retort, and Sirius had half-sobbed in panic at that.

"I know," he whispered, snapping his phone shut and glancing out of the window as if Remus might be standing there on the quad outside. "I think we need to stop all this really." He looked back at James, and swallowed past a hard, anxious lump in his throat, and felt his palm sticking to the plastic of his mobile where he held it uselessly between them. "For him," he added unsteadily, and he remembers thinking that he'd never seen James look so unsettled as he did in that moment; not since the night Sirius had shown up at the Potters' townhouse after their suspension, bruised and bleeding and alone.

"Yeah," James muttered, chewing on his bottom lip, and nodded. "For him."

The door had crashed open at that, and the pair of them had stared across the room at a grinning Remus leaning languidly against the doorframe, jumper rumpled, hair a mess and jacket missing entirely.

"Where the fuck have you been?" Sirius said immediately, cold and desperate and horrid, and Remus frowned, and James took a breath as if he were about to say something, but didn't.

"Chill out," Remus muttered, rolling his eyes, and then he'd kicked the door shut behind him as he slumped into the room and took a great gulp of water from the glass that Sirius always left beside Remus's pillow now.

"Remus," James said softly, putting a careful hand up to hush Sirius, which Sirius would come to thank him for because in that moment - in that wild, awful moment - Sirius knew he wanted to rip Remus limb from limb. He wanted to grab him, and hold him down, and tell him to snap the fuck out of it, out of the whole terrifying thing, because with every drink and every dilated pupil and every trace of white powder on Remus's nose or fingertip Sirius felt something dark and burning being stoked deep within himself, wrenching him apart from the inside. Something caused wholly by Remus and something only Remus could keep from overwhelming Sirius entirely. But for that Remus had to be here. For that, Remus had to be next to Sirius, and he had to be whole and safe and present, and not disappearing down dark cobbled streets into the night, and why did he take his jacket off, anyway, and why is his hair all rumpled like that?

"What, James?" Remus said flatly, now stretched out on his bed, feet at the pillow end.

"Where have you been, mate?"

"I have been," Remus started, letting his arms fall away from him on the sheets, stretching out like a crucifix. "With a gentleman."

James had shifted at that, taking a step towards Remus without - Sirius suspected - even realising his was doing it.

"You've been where?" James said carefully, and Remus smiled.

"With a man. He was nice. I met him in the smoking area. I went home with him."

_With a man. He was nice. I met him in the smoking area. I went home with him._ The words hung in the grey light of their room like blades, terrible and pivotal and, in time, to become as familiar to Sirius as the Latin phrases he'd been forced to learn by heart for his Eton entrance exam, or the words of the school song. They'd never talked about that before - anything like that. Peter cared too much about his stocks and investments to worry about girls. James was just James, and would settle down and get married, in time, and have handsome babies, but not _now_. Not when they were seventeen and had so much else to do. Sirius never even thought about it - or at least, if he did, he didn't let himself remember the next morning - and Remus was too wrapped up in whatever Remus _was_ to have any need for any of that. For girls. Or for boys.

And it had been that, specifically, that had pitched Sirius into that lightless pit that night; that had sent him silently off to his own bed as James helped Remus off with his shoes and told him they'd talk about it tomorrow, and bade them both goodnight. It hadn't been that Remus had disappeared, necessarily. It hadn't been that he was drunk, or high, or that he was staring across at Sirius in the moonlight in a way that was new and strange and horrible. It had been those four short phrases: _With a man. He was nice. I met him in the smoking area. I went home with him._

"What did you do with him?"

He remembers the question, but doesn't remember ever deciding to ask it. He remembers the way Remus laughed, loud and cruel and ringing in the night.

"Shall I show you?" Remus had said, smirking across at Sirius, head still at the wrong end of the bed, feet on his pillow.

"Don't be disgusting," Sirius snapped, and Remus's face fell, and an ugly silence cut through the room and made Sirius's stomach churn horribly.

It might have been moments later, or it might have been just before sunrise - Sirius has never been able to work it out - but at some point he remembers opening his eyes to find Remus standing over him, clumsy and slow and reeking of alcohol.

"Fuck you, Sirius," he'd whispered, glaring down at him in the dark, and then he'd leant over, and laid a clammy hand on Sirius's cheek, and tapped it twice. "Fuck. You."

He'd been close enough that, were it light out, Sirius knows he could've counted every single one of the freckles dotted across the bridge of his nose, just starting to blossom again now that summer was there in earnest. He was so close that Sirius could've lifted himself just an inch, if that, off his pillow, and their lips would've touched. And maybe he should've. Maybe that was what that night was supposed to be about, and maybe if Sirius had found the courage to make something happen between them then the rest of the term would've gone differently.

But he didn't. And Remus went back to bed, and in the morning when Sirius woke Remus was gone again. He turned up just after lunch, skulking into their History lesson ten minutes late and taking a desk at the back of the room and Sirius didn't bother asking him where he'd been when they got back to the school house later. He didn't bother talking to him at all; not that day, or the next, or for the rest of the Summer term, really. Something had shifted between them, painfully, and Sirius wasn't sure whose fault it was - if it was anyone's fault at all - but with end of year exams and summer plans taking over from nights out in the city and lazy weekends spent sprawled on the green there wasn't much time for that sort of thing anyway, and Sirius about managed to convince himself that things weren't as bad as they were, and that he wasn't desperately longing for Fourth Year before things got so messy and they could spend their days tearing through the cloisters together and laughing until their stomachs hurt. Remus still disappeared, on occasion, and came back late at night, having charmed the night porter as he could so easily do back then, and smelling like cigarette smoke and alcohol and sweat. He did, by some miracle (and by James's unerring patience in helping him with his revision) sit his exams, and seemed confident enough that he'd passed them all, and then it was the end of term and Peter was going back to the Lakes and James and Sirius were heading south and none of them had a clue what Remus was doing.

"Back to your parents, is it?" James had said lightly one morning at breakfast, and Remus had smiled.

"Nope," he said, swigging from his water glass. Sirius had stared resolutely down at his own bowl of porridge and pretended not to listen.

"Oh?” James said, skirting round Remus's now ever-present obtuseness. "Hull, then?"

"Nope," Remus said again, and Sirius remembers wanting to kick him.

"Staying here?" James tried one more time, ever the peacekeeper, and Remus just shook his head and stretched his arms up into the air, cracking his back and frowning.

"Nope," he said, and James gave up. Sirius had thought, for a while, that Remus must be staying in the city so that he might spend the summer with whatever man - or men - he'd been stealing away to on Saturday nights, but the thought made him feel physically ill and he banished it whenever it wandered errant into his mind. He and James caught the train home a week later, and Remus waved them off from the station cheerily, and Sirius punched the mirror in the toilet of the train carriage before they'd even passed through Leeds.

"He'll be alright," James had muttered when Sirius came back to their table with smarting knuckles and a red face. The mirror hadn't smashed, much to Sirius's disappointment, and he'd been left feeling embarrassed and in no way mollified by his own outburst or by James's unconvincing reassurances.

July passed in a blaze of heat down on the coast at Fleamont and Effie's cottage, and August saw a stifling return to London and a continuation of the silence between Remus and he that Sirius had both suffered through and willingly prolonged since the end of term. James hadn't spoken to Remus either, despite trying to ring him every week and sending him the odd text message to check in, and by the time September rolled around Sirius was sick with anxiety at the thought of going back to school.

"What if he's not there?" he'd blurted to James one night late in the holidays, over a glass of wine in Effie's kitchen.

"He'll be there," James said flatly, nodding to himself as if that settled it. "He'll be there."

And he was. Miraculously, wonderfully, and to Sirius's utter amazement, he was. The train ride up had been anguish, and the walk from the station to the school house even more so. They dropped James's cases off at his and Peter's room first - Peter, Sirius remembers, would not be arriving until later that evening - and then rounded the cloisters of the quad to come upon Sirius and Remus's room. He remembers James going in first, sliding Sirius's key assuredly into the lock and giving Sirius a tight smile before pushing the door open, and there he was: Remus, looking whole and peaceful, if a little thin, laid on his bed with his legs sticking up vertically against the wall, and a book hovering a few inches from his freckled nose.

"Hi mate," James had chuckled in relief, and gone over to ruffle Remus's hair which earned him a grin as Sirius stood numbly on the threshold between the corridor and the bedroom. Maybe James was just trying not to spook Remus, or something, but Sirius couldn't, in that moment, help but feel utter rage towards Remus and the fact that he was fine, and right here, and clearly could've contacted either one of them at any point over the summer but hadn't and had instead left them to sleepless nights and fraught, desperate worry, and why wasn't James furious with him too?

Peter had arrived a few hours later, and they'd all gone out into town for a start of term celebratory dinner - not that Sirius felt there was anything whatsoever to celebrate - and then it was just him, and Remus, alone in their bedroom for the first time since before the holidays.

"How was your summer?" Remus had asked, and Sirius had scoffed and shaken his head.

"Crap," he spat. "Yours?"

"Crap," Remus laughed, and Sirius had wanted to punch him. He ignored him for a while, busying himself with unpacking his trunk and lining up his new textbooks ready for the start of lessons, and Remus went back to his novel on his bed, and the silence between them built to an unbearable volume that eventually had Sirius flopping down onto his mattress and groaning into his pillow.

"What's up?" Remus said softly, putting his book to one side. Sirius turned his head and watched him for a long moment before speaking.

"Where were you?"

"Back at the hospital."

It hit Sirius like a train. He'd realise the madness of it later, but there hadn't been a single moment that summer when he'd considered the possibility that Remus might've been sent back there. It felt like that was all done and sorted last year, and it had been misguided anyway - because Remus was _fine_ , in that regard at least - so there was no need to revisit it and Sirius wanted to punch himself, then, for spending two months cursing Remus and the men he might've been seeing in York whilst the rest of them were all at home for the holidays and Remus was hidden away somewhere on some bright, sterile ward, all alone.

"Why?" Sirius had asked, and Remus smiled.

"Don't think they knew what else to do with me."

Sirius regarded him then, and noted the way his face was slimmer than it had been last term, and how the sleeves of his sweatshirt hung a little looser than intended around his pale wrists. His eyes, too, seemed changed somehow; not as bright as they once were, but then, by that point, Sirius couldn't remember if that was their natural state or if he was just too used to seeing dilated pupils and that wildness he despised and could never get enough of.

"I stopped eating," Remus said, as if he'd read Sirius's mind. "Once I got there, I stopped eating."

"Why?" Sirius asked again, a whisper this time, and thought he might die from the deep, wrenching pain in his chest.

"To piss them off," Remus had laughed, grinning across the room at him. "I was fine before they sent me there."

"Are you not fine now?"

The words ached as he spoke them, and Remus just shrugged, and Sirius couldn't remember ever feeling as sad as he felt in that moment.

"What about the other stuff?" Sirius asked, even though they never talked about that. They simply never did. They weren't even really talking about it then; it was a half-conversation at best, a cowardly, impotent thing that Sirius knew would likely do more harm than good. "Is that fine?"

"Probably not," Remus had said, and picked up his book, and laid back down with his legs against the wall. "But it doesn't really matter, does it?"

And again, it felt like a shift. There were university applications to be done that autumn, and James diligently sent his own off and felt good about his chances for Oxford, and Peter was torn between Exeter for Business and Bristol for Finance and Accounting, and Sirius fancied Classics at Edinburgh as he'd always suspected he would, and Remus just shrugged when James asked about his own applications and told him that he'd send them, at some point, but that it didn't really matter. And it was something in those words, and Remus's easy smile, that found Sirius hunched over on a chair in James's room one Wednesday afternoon with his chest heaving and his hands clutching desperately, painfully in his tangled hair.

"He's not alright, James," he'd insisted, wavering and breathless, his vision dark around the edges. "He's not. He's not."

"I know," James had shushed him, and held him, and Remus had come home later and told them he'd sent off all his applications, and Sirius hadn't slept at all that night.

There was a time, in the Epiphany term of their final year at the Chorister's School, when things seemed to get better for a spell. Remus was bright and cheery, and didn't often disappear off into the city, and the four of them spent the early days of spring out on the green between the school and the cathedral as they had done as boys and for a brief, wonderful moment Sirius thought that perhaps they'd managed to find their way back there before they would need to part ways for new chapters. They'd all got their offers back, and James was set for Oxford, Peter heading off to Bristol, and both Remus and Sirius with unconditional offers for the same course at Edinburgh, which thrilled Sirius beyond words and he found himself wandering lazily through plans and daydreams about a life for the two of them up there, all dark libraries and Gothic arches in the snow and stacks and stacks of books around the turreted bedroom they would surely share. 

"What are you smiling at?" Remus asked, grinning up from where he was resting his head in Sirius's lap, freckles just beginning to show.

"Doesn't matter," Sirius had said without thinking, and that dark, suffocating dread had reared up inside him again, and he'd found himself searching out Remus's clammy hand in the grass and clutching at it wordlessly. James noticed, and didn't say anything, and Remus just smiled up at him still and closed his eyes.

Sirius stayed for the Easter holidays, Peter and James both heading home for some peace in which to study for their final exams, and Sirius and Remus had two wonderful, agonising weeks to themselves. They brought their books out to the green and worked with bottles of pop and sandwiches from the canteen, and Remus quizzed Sirius on his Greek whilst Sirius helped Remus with his Latin, and in the middle weekend of the holidays then went down to the river and read novels on a bench and tore up a bread roll that Remus pulled from Sirius's bag and laughed as they tossed it to the swans on the water. And it terrified Sirius. It terrified him beyond words, because it felt like the last time. Something in the way Remus threw his head back in mirth, and how his eyes shone so brightly in the April sun. Something in the cold rush that ran down Sirius's spine every time the sun went behind a cloud, and how Remus checked Sirius’s watch in the early afternoon and declared that they should have a drink to celebrate - to celebrate what, Sirius didn't know - and how Sirius followed him into town anyway and they ended up in a Tesco buying litre bottles of vodka that Sirius had no intention of drinking,

He did, of course; it took no encouragement whatsoever, just the line of Remus's throat when he threw back his own cupful and the way he grinned at Sirius across their bedroom, and Sirius was reaching for one of the bottles and gulping the spirit down neat, throat burning and eyes burning and chest aching at the way Remus was watching him. The sun began to set, and they ate leftover sandwiches for dinner, and Sirius must have dozed off at some point because when he woke the room was dark and empty and he knew, instinctively, where to go,

"I can't believe they haven't finished this place yet," he muttered when he stepped into the old rectory, still bare plaster walls and abandoned ladders and a window at the far end that Sirius thinks Remus broke sometime last year.

"I hope they never finish it," Remus said serenely, spinning round in the middle of the room with his arms thrown out and his eyes closed. And then Sirius remembers going to him, and holding him, and clutching desperately at the damp fabric of the back of Remus's shirt and burying his face in the side of Remus's neck and how he could feel his pulse there, and how it somehow felt both too slow and too fast at the same time, and how Sirius could barely breathe through the panic at how ephemeral everything seemed in that moment.

It ended, inevitably so, and yet entirely unexpectedly, on a morning in June the week after they all sat their final exams. Peter had spent the days leading up to it boasting about how well he was sure he'd done in Maths, and James had admitted to being quietly confident about meeting the conditions of his Oxford offer. Even Remus had shrugged and said he thought he'd done alright, although he was still unsure about some of the Latin, and Sirius was so pleased with them all that he insisted they eat out on the green one last time, and they begged trays from the ladies in the canteen and headed out with bowls of salads and bread rolls and a flagon of apple juice. They stayed out into the evening, laughing and reminiscing about the times they would miss desperately once the end of term came. James had them all in tears recounting the day Peter fell off a ladder on the first gallery of the library and split his trousers in the process, and Sirius lead them all in a bawdy round of the school song before the sun finally went down and they ambled, still laughing and jostling, back towards the school house. They said their goodnights, and James and Peter wandered off arm-in-arm around the cloisters, and Sirius fell into bed happy and tired and full of an aching love for the lot of them.

It happened around three in the morning, Sirius thinks. It was still dark out - but the milky, thin sort of darkness that precedes the early notes of a summer's day's dawning. He'd been sleeping soundly, dreamlessly, and then he'd heard his name drifting through the fog, distant and melancholy. He turned over in his bed, and tried to sink back into that warm and peaceful sleep, but there was his name again; something calling to him on some high wind, more urgent now, darker and nearer and louder until he woke, eyes flying open to the grey light of the room and Remus sitting across from him, on the side of his own bed, eyes wide and face pinched in anguish.

"What's wrong?" Sirius had mumbled, suspended for a moment in some liminal space between dreams and terrifying wakefulness.

"I can't do it," Remus had whispered, a wretched, broken thing, and Sirius had pushed himself up numbly on his mattress, and seen that Remus's face was shining with tears. "I can't do it."

"Can't do what?," Sirius had asked stupidly, not allowing himself to believe that that was the moment all of it had been leading up to, and remembers now how strange and alien his own voice had sounded to him, and how Remus had shaken his head and stared across at him still, eyes full and terrified.

"Any of it," he'd said, and Sirius had blinked across at him dumbly, feeling cold all over and frozen in some sort of stasis, one foot on the wooden floor and his hands clutching at his sheets. And then he'd seen the dilated pupils, and the clammy mist of sweat on the side of Remus's neck picked out in the waning moonlight filtering through the curtains, and the way Remus's breath was coming fast and thin now, a deafening, ragged refrain in the silence of the room.

"What have you taken?" Sirius had asked flatly, feeling a chasm wrenching itself open inside his chest into which fell all the happiness from the green the evening before, from their years in the library and the school house and the scant daydreams he'd permitted himself about what they might find next, together, new things and better things and unspoken things and it was all falling, fading and collapsing into the empty space between them as Remus shook his head and choked out a frayed, agonising sob.

"I can't do it," he repeated, and then Sirius was up and out of bed and taking Remus's face in his hands as he stood over him and felt everything falling apart and _hated_ him for it.

"What have you taken?" he remembers begging, and glancing around the room as if he might find it littered with empty pill packets, and when he turned back to Remus it was to eyes duller than a moment ago, and a brow damper still with sweat. "You fucking idiot, Remus."

Remus pushed a forearm against his own stomach then, as Sirius watched his face contort into something ugly and strained, and lolled forwards as his body emptied itself onto his lap and Sirius's bare feet and the oak floor between them.

He doesn't remember much of what happened from then; he thinks he asked him again what he'd taken, and he thinks Remus shook his head and faded further, and then he must've rung someone or cried out for help because the next thing Sirius remembers is the night porter bursting into their room and, moments later, a slew of paramedics in bright jackets and tutors in their nightwear and then, at some point, James and Peter. He remembers being in a brightly lit corridor at what must've been the hospital, and he remembers James bellowing at a nurse with red hair somewhere down a long, sterile hallway, and then - aeons later - he remembers registering that the sun was up, and already at its zenith, and streaming through the wide windows in the hospital's waiting area, and Peter was tucked into his side and dribbling on the arm of a hoodie that he didn't remember putting on, and recognised distantly to be James's.

It was the smell that would stay with Sirius. For years after that day, the acrid, sterile smell of that hospital waiting room, all disinfectant and bandages and fear, would turn his stomach violently every time he forcibly encountered it. When taking Remus to an appointment, months later, Sirius would find himself sitting next to an open window on the ward just so that he might smell the rain and the fresh air outside rather than the cloying stench of the ward itself. When Harry was born, and Remus drove them both to the hospital to visit, Sirius would stand on the threshold of the maternity building and find himself utterly paralysed, holding his breath and staring blankly at the white walls across from him and Remus would lead him back outside to a low wooden bench, damp with morning dew, and rub his back and offer him small sips from a cup of cold coffee until Sirius came back to him. It would never leave him, never go away; an irremovable scar from the day at the end of Seventh Year, when Sirius thought they'd lost everything and that Remus had been right when he'd told him, so many times, that none of it mattered.

"They say he'll probably sleep for the rest of the day, at least," a voice said, breaking through the fog in the waiting room, and Sirius blinked up to see James standing over him, looking tired and wan and with his hair all ruffled up at one side.

"Oh," Sirius had murmured, voice thin and raspy. "And then he'll wake up?"

"Yeah, he'll wake up mate," James said softly, sinking into the chair on the other side of Sirius and pushing the heels of his hands into his eyes, glasses pushed up comically on his forehead. "He'll wake up."

"Then what?"

He'd felt like a child, even then, and Sirius's heart aches for himself whenever he thinks back to that afternoon in the hospital, and how he'd been so tired and so far away, and how he hadn't really understood what had happened, and what had nearly happened, and where any of them were supposed to go from there. It would hit him, later, and take the breath from him when it did, and he'd find himself clinging to James whenever he couldn't sleep that summer, and whenever he remembered that hollow, haunted look in Remus's eyes in the darkness of their bedroom in the school house.

But in the moment he'd just looked across at James, entirely at sea, and James had put a hand on his knee and huffed out a long, rattled breath.

"I don't know, Sirius," he'd said, and Sirius thought it was the first time in their lives that James hadn't known the answer. "I don't know."

Remus did wake up though, just like James said, early the next morning when Peter had gone back to school for a shower and to pick up a bag for Remus, and James had wandered off down a corridor at the hospital muttering something about apologising to a nurse he'd shouted at, and Sirius was sitting alone in the waiting area, still wearing James's hoodie, and chewing listlessly on a cereal bar he'd forced himself to buy from the vending machine.

He tried not to go to him. He wished, although he despised himself for it, that Remus hadn't woken until James was there with him, or until Peter had got back from school. It felt cruel and wicked of Remus to wake when Sirius was alone and was the only one who could go to him, and hold his hand, and brush his greasy hair from his forehead and tell him that he was loved and treasured and that he mattered, so much. But Sirius didn't do any of that; he faltered, when a doctor came to him and told him that his friend was awake, and he hovered for an age outside the door to the room that Remus was being kept in. It wouldn't occur to him until later that if anyone should've been there it should've been Remus's parents, surely, and he wouldn't find out until _much_ later that they'd been contacted twice by the hospital; first when Remus was admitted, and then again as soon as he woke up, and upon hearing that he was awake and recovering they'd simply turned the car around and driven back home. If he'd known that, Sirius thinks, then he probably wouldn't have waited as long as he did before pushing open the door to Remus's room.

He'd expected something awful. Great machines pumping air into Remus's lungs, screens and flashing lights and wires keeping him plugged in and rooted there so that he couldn't try to drift away again. But there was none of that; just Remus, in a light blue gown, with a single thin plastic tube running over the pale skin above his upper lip where that dark freckle was just beginning to show. Sirius stood in the doorway and watched him, for an age, and thought numbly on how they were always bound to end up here. He thought about the long nights in the city, and empty pill packets on a bedside table, and Remus spinning around in a freshly-plastered hall. He thought about missed deadlines, and poorly written essays, and faceless men on the other side of the river, calling out to Remus.

He thought - before he knew any better - about how they could've stopped it. He thought about how any one of them could've stopped it; how James could've stopped it, and how Peter could've stopped it. He thought about how he could've stopped it. And how none of them did.

"Sirius?"

He looks up, across the table in the bar, and sees Remus grinning over at him. He blinks at him stupidly. There's a fleck of ketchup smudged into the corner of Remus's mouth.

"Are you going to finish those?" Remus prompts.

Sirius glances down at the basket of chips in front of him, and Remus nods to them, and raises his eyebrows expectantly.

"All yours," Sirius says softly, smiling back at him, and pushes the chips over, watching as Remus devours them, licking tomato sauce from his fingertips and washing it down inelegantly with a great glug from his glass of lemonade.

"You were in another world there," Remus teases after a moment, wiping his mouth on a napkin. "What were you thinking about?"

Sirius just shakes his head, and finishes his drink. "Nothing," he says quietly, and grabs his jacket from the bench next to him. "Did you want to go somewhere else?"

"Nope," Remus smiles, and stands to shrug his own coat on. "Let's just go home."

They bundle themselves out of the cafe, and onto the snow-covered street outside. The flakes are still drifting down lazily from a dark, amber-grey sky above, the city quiet and softened despite the Christmas bustle, and Remus slips an easy hand into Sirius's as they pad down the hill towards the park, and across to the stone steps that lead up to their flat. They did get the turreted bedroom in their first year, much to Sirius's elation, and then a cheap, tatty little house in New Town for their second. A flat by Greyfriars Kirk had come to them, entirely by chance, just in time for their third year and they've already decided, less than three months into term, that they'll stay there for their final year too; Remus had told Sirius on their first night that the view from their leaded window reminded him of the view from the library across the green to the Minster - something to do with the way the moonlight came through the oak trees - and that had been enough for Sirius. He'd happily stay here forever if it meant Remus would say things like that.

"Tell me what you're thinking about," Remus says as they round the corner to their street, and he nudges Sirius playfully in the arm. "Stop being so mysterious."

Sirius smiles across at him and then, at the foot of the stone steps, he stops.

"I'm thinking," he says, taking Remus's face between his gloved hands, and delighting at the snowflakes catching on the loose curls poking out from under the brim of Remus's knitted hat. "About how much you matter to me."

"Soppy," Remus tuts, grinning and rolling his eyes.

"You do," Sirius says softly, and nods. "You matter so much."

It's not the first time he's said it. It's not the second, or the third. He tries to say it most days, when they're together, and when they're not he'll ring Remus anyway to make sure he still knows. He tries not to think on how he should've started saying it years ago, back at the Chorister's School, in the library and on the green and in their bedroom when Remus's pupils were blown miles wide and his wrists were too thin and he was dancing in slow circles, or stealing away in the dark, or sobbing on his bed and telling Sirius that he couldn't do it anymore; any of it.

But he says it now. And James says it, and Peter says it. Remus's therapist says it, and Lily says it, too, and Sirius knows he won't ever let himself stop saying it, and that it will never be less true. 

Remus is silent for a moment, held there in Sirius's snow-dusted hands, and then - as the flurries fall around them, and the winter sky darkens, and the ancient bells in the quiet churchyard toll - he nods.

"I know."


End file.
